Winston of the Prairie | Page 2

eagerness in check, but other men were waiting
for his place, and he went out and crossed the street to the hotel where
there was light to read by. As he entered it a girl bustling about a long
table in the big stove-warmed room turned with la little smile.

"It's only you!" she said. "Now I was figuring it was Lance
Courthorne."
Winston, impatient as he was, stopped and laughed, for the
hotel-keeper's daughter was tolerably well-favored and a friend of his.
"And you're disappointed?" he said. "I haven't Lance's good looks, or
his ready tongue."
The room was empty, for the guests were thronging about the post
office then, and the girl's eyes twinkled as she drew back a pace and
surveyed the man. There was nothing in his appearance that would
have aroused a stranger's interest, or attracted more than a passing
glance, as he stood before her in a very old fur coat, with a fur cap that
was in keeping with it held in his hand.
His face had been bronzed almost to the color of a Blackfeet Indian's
by frost and wind and sun, but it was of English type from the crisp fair
hair above the broad forehead to the somewhat solid chin. The mouth
was hidden by the bronze-tinted mustache, and the eyes alone were
noticeable. They were gray, and there was a steadiness in them which
was almost unusual even in that country where men look into long
distances. For the rest, he was of average stature, and stood impassively
straight, looking down upon the girl, without either grace or
awkwardness, while his hard brown hands suggested, as his attire did,
strenuous labor for a very small reward.
"Well," said the girl, with Western frankness, "there's a kind of stamp
on Lance that you haven't got. I figure he brought it with him from the
old country. Still, one might take you for him if you stood with the light
behind you, and you're not quite a bad-looking man. It's a kind of pity
you're so solemn."
Winston smiled. "I don't fancy that's astonishing after losing two
harvests in succession," he said. "You see there's nobody back there in
the old country to send remittances to me."
The girl nodded with quick sympathy. "Oh, yes. The times are bad,"

she said. "Well, you read your letters, I'm not going to worry you."
Winston sat down and opened the first envelope under the big lamp. It
was from a land agent and mortgage broker, and his face grew a trifle
grimmer as he read, "In the present condition of the money market your
request that we should carry you over is unreasonable, and we regret
that unless you can extinguish at least half the loan we will be
compelled to foreclose upon your holding."
There was a little more of it, but that was sufficient for Winston, who
knew it meant disaster, and it was with the feeling of one clinging
desperately to the last shred of hope he tore open the second envelope.
The letter it held was from a friend he had made in a Western city, and
once entertained for a month at his ranch, but the man had evidently
sufficient difficulties of his own to contend with.
"Very sorry, but it can't be done," he wrote. "I'm loaded up with wheat
nobody will buy, and couldn't raise five hundred dollars to lend any one
just now."
Winston sighed a little, but when he rose and slowly straightened
himself nobody would have suspected he was looking ruin in the face.
He had fought a slow losing battle for six weary years, holding on
doggedly though defeat appeared inevitable, and now when it had come
he bore it impassively, for the struggle which, though he was scarcely
twenty-six, had crushed all mirth and brightness out of his life, had
given him endurance in place of them. Just then a man came bustling
towards him, with the girl, who bore a tray, close behind.
"What are you doing with that coat on?" he said. "Get it off and sit
down right there. The boys are about through with the mail and
supper's ready."
Winston glanced at the steaming dishes hungrily, for he had passed
most of the day in the bitter frost, eating very little, and there was still a
drive of twenty miles before him.
"It is time I was taking the trail," he said.

He was sensible of a pain in his left side, which, as other men have
discovered, not infrequently follows enforced abstinence from food, but
he remembered what he wanted the half-dollar in his pocket for. The
hotel-keeper had possibly some notion of the state of affairs, for he
laughed a little.
"You've got to sit down," he said.